Graduated from The University of Nottingham with a 1st Degree Honours, but by the skin of my teeth. My practical exam marks were shocking. My clinical reasoning marks broke records and ruffled feathers. This was my first learning that there are multiple aspects of physiotherapy, and we’re not all made to fit all of it.

I started my pelvic health journey in 2010, and found the area of physio that made sense to me. I loved the intimacy, the longer time spent, and getting into the nitty-gritty of life with people. The requirement for a more relational-based approach really suited me. I particularly liked working with clients experiencing trauma-related persistent pain, and gained a strong reputation in this area.

Despite my love of pelvic health, I still struggled with buying into physiotherapy in general. I remember going to Diane Lee’s ISM course, thinking if this doesn’t resolve my doubt, nothing will, and I’ll leave the profession. Luckily, it did! I found the approach helped me have full confidence in my bio-mechanical reasoning. I knew whether I really knew what was going on or I was just guessing, and this gave me a new sense of integrity to my clinical work (and hugely improved my client outcomes).

This was a post-grad training for qualified counsellors that I was lucky to partake in. I learned some key hallmarks of therapy practice that are directly applicable to physiotherapy practice; I learned how to self-regulate, how to separate my own issues from the person in front of me; how to read someone’s somatic experience to offer truly trauma-informed care, and through hours of practice, got much more comfortable sitting in the uncomfortable with both myself and clients.

I was so scared to be a boss and lead people, and so I took this course to build confidence and try to get ahead of the game. While it did build confidence, the main thing it’s designed to do is show you is where you’ll go wrong. And successfully so! The feedback I was given has predicted every leadership mistake I’ve made over the years. Some things I think you really have to learn through the consequences of mistakes. But the insight from this training absolutely helped me recover and repair quickly and offered me a greater understanding of the mechanics of why I made the mistakes I did.

Having had such a profound learning experience through my therapy program, I was inspired to figure out how to bring this valuable content into the physio profession, but I had no idea how! The content and learning style were just so different from how everything was done in physio (and this was before these concepts were trending like they are now!). This MEd taught me what relational, cohort-based and experiential education can look like. All of my teaching is centred on the skills and experiences I learned in this program, including the principles we use to mentor and teach at The Cheerful Pelvis.

Honestly, I took this course because I wanted to put a credential to my mentorship work and didn’t want to say I’m a ‘coach’ without a specific coaching training program to my name. I guess I have some ‘good girl’ inside me after all, as I didn’t want to infringe on the term, despite it not being regulated. It was a great weekend, but what I learned is that what I offer and how I want to offer it is not true coaching. I use some coaching principles, mainly drawn from my therapy training, but I also mentor and consult, often offering direct advice, which steps outside of a couch’s remit. I may pick this training up again in the future, but I’m having fun and seeing success with where I’m at right now!